Born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, Nicola Barker spent a portion of her formative years in South Africa, returning to the UK at the age of 14. Published in 1993, her first collection of short stories, Love Your Enemies, was the winner of the David Higham prize for fiction, and joint winner of the Pen/Macmillan Silver Pen award. Since then, she has written 11 novels and another short story collection, and in 2003 she was named one of Granta’s 20 best young British novelists. Her 2007 book Darkmans made the Man Booker shortlist, and she has made the longlist on two other occasions for her works Clear: A Transparent Novel and The Yips. Her new novel, H(a)ppy (William Heinemann), is out on 20 July.

1 | Documentary

I have mixed feelings (at best) about Julian Assange, but a dear friend of mine - who’s recently been staying in my flat - is a member of his American legal team. She’s ridiculously discreet, of course, but being around that WikiLeaks vibe, even at third hand, has been intensely entertaining for me. The drama! The paranoia! The subterfuge! Novelists are naturally nosy and love filling in the gaps, so last week I snuck along to watch Laura Poitras’s Risk. There’s charisma here aplenty: idealism, opportunism, cynicism and betrayal at almost Shakespearean levels. But what of Poitras herself? Hidden away behind that camera - Banquo’s ghost, I wonder, or Lady Macbeth?

2 | Food

I’m moving back to Hastings after many years in London’s East End, and one of the places I shall really miss is this greengrocer on Wapping Lane. Wapping has always been deeply fragmented: a cultural vacuum on the riverfront (full of bankers and estate agencies), a bit of cockney beef shoved in-between (which Hussey’s personifies) and the exoticism of Cable Street and Whitechapel just beyond. In recent years the fashionable Shoreditch overspill is finding a home here. Hussey’s persists, though, doggedly, heroically (hard up against new battalions of coffee shops). It’s an Aladdin’s cave of hot lunches, cold salads, sugary doughnuts, scotch eggs, boiled beetroot, wafer-thin ham, halloumi, flowers, fruit and walnuts but without even the slightest whiff of smugness or pretension. Too real to be real, in other words.

3 | Book

I was lucky enough to get my paws on a digital copy of Scottish writer/poet Alan Spence’s latest project last week - this tiny book of 13 haiku about tulips. Spence’s 2014 book Night Boat - the fantastical story of great, Japanese Zen master Hakuin - is one of my favourite novels of recent years, and this is an exquisite follow-up. All writers secretly long to create at least one book in their lifetime that is both utterly simple and infinitely profound. Ways of Looking is expansive, intimate, present, glorious, devout, cool, hushed, glowing but so tiny, so madly fragile. Imagine Ogata Kōrin’s legendary, gilded painting Irises, but in written form.

4 | Film

Allison Dean and Ashley Judd in the ‘transformative’ Ruby in Paradise. Photograph: Alamy

I first saw this in 1993. It’s the story of a young woman (Ashley Judd, at her most luminous) struggling to build a life for herself in an out-of-season Florida resort town. I won’t deign to call it a socioeconomic feminist masterwork, but, um, yes. I will. I shall. Because it is. I’ve been facing some big decisions in my life of late and suddenly, oddly, this film popped into my head. I hunted it down online and it’s been transformative. I’m packing up my old life, moving back to the coast. It has brought me calm and hope and rest. Not so much a film, really, as a wonderful one-hour-49-minute-50-second tub of celluloid balm for the soul.

5 | Fashion

I think I may have been an air hostess in an earlier incarnation because I love small scarves. It’s a passion. The perfect-sized little scarf is like the holy grail of accessories in my book. I’m talking 20 to 27 inches, max. A few months ago, I discovered a fantastic stall on Spitalfields market that sells small, antique scarves - gorgeous, vibrant, in every colour - for a mere pound a pop. A long trestle table is piled a foot high in them - 50s ones, ethnic ones, raw silk ones - all jumbled together like a fabulous mess of slippery tagliatelle. What greater - or more innocent - pleasure can there possibly be on a Sunday morning than spending half an hour elbow-deep in the voluptuous scrum?

6 | Art

I receive posts from Artsy.net (an online gallery/magazine) every day and love them. A recent article about how mid-range galleries are struggling financially really struck a chord with me. When you stagger out of the overground station at Shoreditch High Street, one reason for this immediately becomes clear: artists travel from all over the world to show their work here - on the streets, for free. Shoreditch itself is a giant open gallery - all the way over to Brick Lane and beyond. I’m a sticker freak. And I love posters. But best of all, I enjoy the chaotic melange. The battle of creativity. Stuff sprayed over, stuck on, ripped off, torn up. TThe smell of wet paper and glue and piss. That’s proper art, that is.

7 | Performance

Mass, where ‘you’ll find a ready-made community’. Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer

I’m a bit of a cheapskate and the performance space I most regularly frequent (the Catholic mass) has no formal entrance fee (although it certainly appreciates donations) and takes place in gorgeous, ancient venues all over the UK. It’s such a magical thing to arrive somewhere new and know you’ll find a ready-made community there - with attendant ritual, drama, costumes, fragrance, song. To shake a stranger’s hand, to share their cup. Just to be present but quiet. To become invisible. Or to participate, if you prefer. To mumble the script. To sing out. To slide along the pew. To yawn. To drift. To inspect the embroidery on an old kneeler. To exhale. To belong.